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Former Workers Suing Boise Call Center Managers

May 12, 2014

By Oliver VanDervoort, Contributing Writer

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With call centers all over the country winding down their support for people who are looking for information about the Affordable Care Act, there are hundreds, if not thousands of people losing their jobs. One group of laid-off workers is not taking the loss of their jobs lying down. Instead, the former employees of a Boise call center are suing their former employer, claiming they were never told that their jobs were only temporary.

These kinds of claims are nothing new to the call centers that were dealing with the ACA. The federal subcontractor, Maximus Inc., hired hundreds of Idahoans to work at the call center it was running starting last June. While they were working for the call center, their job was to answer questions about enrolling in the ACA and helping people sign up and purchase healthcare plans.

Open enrollment for those plans ended in March and with the end of that enrollment came the end to many a job. Maximus, which is located in Virginia, has laid off more than 1,500 employees from the Boise call center. This same sort of situation has been going on in states like Florida and there have been plenty of people all around the U.S. who have claimed they didn’t understand their jobs were going away.

Employees at the Boise call center say they were told the positions they were taking were “career” employment opportunities. Two of the people involved in the suit claim they left other lucrative call center jobs to work for Maximus. Another says she shut down her own small business to come to work at the Boise center.

The lawsuit is looking for more than $80,000 in damages and also wants to be branded a class-action status in order to include other laid-off Boise employees. Maximus, in turn showed off a letter that called all the jobs at the center “at-will” employment which means they can be ended at any time the employer wants.